May 19, 2026. I was asked to give the invocation for a meeting of Mayor & Council. The poem I read, “Notes Toward a Poem for the Land,” was written at the request of some of the elders involved in organizing with TBOSC - Tucson Birthplace Open Space Coalition. http://www.tucsonopenspace.org
I've been appointed Tucson Poet Laureate
Truly wild news.
This morning the City of Tucson, in partnership with the Arts Foundation for Tucson and Southern Arizona and the University of Arizona Poetry Center, announced that I’ve been appointed Tucson Poet Laureate for a three year term, beginning now and running until 2029.
I’m honored to be seen in this way, and thrilled to step into the role. If you read this newsletter you’ve heard me call myself a cultural worker, which is a term that encompasses the political economy of being an artist and all the many types labor of participating in the arts ecosystem: yes, writing poems, but also setting up chairs, designing posters, booking events and above all: opening the door for others to step into those roles in their own ways.
There are so many great poets in this city, a true literary & arts ecosystem that I have felt lucky to contribute to for almost two decades. The way I understand it, this appointment was made based off that past work, but it is also an invitation (a dare!) to do something new.
In the coming months I’ll be sharing more about a new project, the ¡Somos Uno! Poetry & Storytelling Series, a season of events at venues across Tucson highlighting the intercultural, cross-generational and artistically diverse possibilities of poetry.
In some ways, this is what I’ve always done. In others, I’m standing at the beginning of an entirely new journey. If you’re reading this, if you’ve ever made it out to a show, read a poem of mine, bought a book, given me a ride, picked up the tab, booked me, recommended me – thank you. I am so deeply grateful to have been able to stay on this winding path so long and it’s only because I’m surrounded by good people like you.
Reckon Book Launch - Tucson
The launches for Reckon have been magic. Beyond grateful for the book to arrive surrounded by such powerful people.
Vid: Running Coyote
Music: Gabriel Sullivan
Photography: Julius Schlosburg
Publication Day for 'Reckon'
Today marks the official release of Reckon.
I hope I’m not sending emails too frequently, but these are heady days for me. Sometime in 2019 I realized the poems I was writing wanted to be a full book. Since then, it’s been a long and winding road, but I don’t think it could have gone any quicker than it did – there were young kids to parent and serious soul-searching to undertake, not to mention finishing an MFA and research, reading, and more reading.
There’s more I want to say – and will say – about the process. But today I’m celebrating, and also passing along some ideas that I find useful when approaching revision. Revising poems is a creative act for me – many of the pieces in Reckon started out as stanzas in other poems. More on that below.
The book is out – tell a friend! Order a copy, or five!
Unboxing 'Reckon'
And I’m sharing this tender, personal moment with you the day after ICE agents murdered a mother in her car in Minneapolis. This is how we live now – how we have lived for so long. Moments of profound joy smeared against cruel acts of violence. How do we make it through?
First by not abandoning the joy. All week I’ve been working on sending this message to you, but early this morning I had my doubts. Why care about a poetry book in times like these? I remind myself – have been reminded by many – that it’s always times like these somewhere, for someone. Which is not to diminish them unto the mundane. Rather, my anger grows. All of deserve to live in a world that is more just than this one, and that world, a more humane world, is so much closer than we’ve been led to believe.
So I’m keeping that faith, remembering the dialectic, and sending you this message despite – because of – it all. Fighting for joy with anger, all at once, even as
I’m holding the book in my hands
after seven years of dreaming, seven years of pushing myself to dig deeper than I wanted to or thought I could. This is the most personal work I’ve ever written. And the courage required to write it now transforms into the courage needed to share it with you. RECKON begins shipping later this month, can I sign a copy and send it to you before the official release date?
~ Kick off your 2026 writing poetry ~
Last chance to register
for my online seminar
happening next Monday, January 12!
The December “Big Cold Supermoon” rises over Tucson, as seen from the land at S-Cuk Ṣon, via TBOSC - Tucson Birthplace Open Space Coalition.
The world needs more poets.
Or more specifically, the world needs more poetry. More people engaged in the regular practice of poetry, reading and writing it, whether they want to call themselves poets or not.
More poems would be helpful, but not nearly as much as more people spending more time in the beautiful struggle of putting words to the page.
This week I read Tracy K. Smith’s book Fear Less: Poetry in Perilous Times (big rec!), just out on Norton. “Beyond literature, beyond works of art, poems are acts of attention,” Smith reminds us, having earlier said that “there is nothing in a poem that does not wish to be noticed.”
Attention? In this economy?
Exactly.
A recent study published in Psychological Bulletin (ProQuest) looked at the prolonged consumption of short-form video on human brains and attention spans. Spoiler: it’s not good.
According to author Brad Stulberg, who put me onto the study, short-form video – aka Reels, TikToks or *gasp* Stories – is “highly processed information,” doing for our brains what highly processed foods do to our bodies. Necessarily lacking depth and nuance, these videos can function as empty calories, giving us a hit of dopamine without challenging us.
So many of us spend time on the infinite scroll, watching short videos for news and entertainment. Moreover, statistically speaking, the younger you are, the more time you spend consuming information this way.
Regardless of its danger or merit, short-form video is the online lengua franca and the coin of the realm, rewarded by the algorithms and expected by users.
For artists, they become yet another digital to-do. Earlier this week I put out a “talking head video” myself. While I enjoy connecting with people (even online), these videos take a huge amount of time to make and become but droplets in a surging sea of other droplets.
It’s surprising how vulnerable our attention spans are. I’ve been a reader my entire life, but when I started an MFA program in 2018 I was shocked at how hard it was for me to sit with the required books. Sure, I was parenting twin toddlers at the time, but my reading practice had begun splintering years before.
My ability to read was a muscle that had atrophied, a muscle that took regular practice to build back to health.
In this “attention economy,” the solution is to do less of less and more of more. See Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, and Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman, or any number of other books – books! – on the topic.
Apart from a fiercely guarded reading practice, you already know my preferred exercise: the writing of poetry.
Like physical exercise, writing poetry isn’t necessarily about how well you do it, but that you do it, and do it regularly.
And what better time to start than now, during a hectic holiday season in a chaotic year?
All of this is part of why I’ve been working on a new offering: Poetry For Every Writer, an online seminar I’ll be leading live via Zoom on January 12.
If you have written, if you want to write, or if you do write: then yes, this all-levels session is for you. I’ll be giving an overview, offering all my tips & tricks, and inviting you to set up a writing practice that serves you in the new year and long beyond. We’ll be doing some writing during the session, but no one is required to share.
To make this happen I’ve partnered with my friend Margo Stienes who is an amazing writer of nonfiction (her book Brutalities: A Love Story is incredible) and writing consultant. Earlier this week we got together on Instagram Live to talk about the seminar.
Registration is open now, and if the tuition is a barrier for you, please let us know, there are scholarships available.
I’ll let Smith have the last word here:
“A poem is an invitation to step outside this loop of habit and haste, and, for a time, to cease jockeying. It is an opportunity–temporary though it may be–to replace a system of worth based on power and capital with something else.
Poetry is a place writers go not to deposit meaning, but to seek it out.”
Hope to see many of you January 12!
One way to fight is to amplify what you love
Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, 2020. Photo: Russ McSpadden
Entire mountainsides were being blown up, their green and tan living skins sloughing off to reveal the rock talc of their bones. Then the machines moved in, grinding, clawing, hauling – flattening. Ancient water was pulled from the earth and sprayed out by the truckload just to keep down the dust. This was – and is – the building of the border wall, slicing across the landscape of my heart, the land that raised me – and I was watching it all from the comfort of my own home.
This was 2020 after all. There was a pandemic raging and I was sheltering in place with Spring and the kids, then six years old. But of course not everyone would or could stay home. Even when I’d break quarantine to go into the streets to protest that hot summer, I would come home to this:
watching the destruction of the rising border wall on Twitter, via the camera lenses of those who were in the field doing the work of witness.
I didn’t know them personally then, but came to know their work intimately, near obsessively. Russ McSpadden and Laiken Jordahl were spending days and nights camped out in the remotest areas of the Arizona-Sonora borderlands. The world could watch the messy, unnecessary and destructive spectacle thanks to them. Others such as Amber Ortega (Hia Ced O’odham) and Nellie Jo David (Tohono O’odham) were physically putting their bodies and voices on the line to protect the land, water and living creatures.
Later I had the honor of meeting them ‘in real life:’ Amber was (an amazing!) featured poet at our Cultivating Culture series last year at Tucson’s Mission Garden, and I was introduced to Russ by the writer and artist Johanna Skibsrud. Turns out many of us were deeply traumatized by watching what had happened (is happening) to the land, especially those who saw, heard, and smelled it first hand.
Turns out poetry was key in helping Russ process what he had witnessed: the intricate and beautiful biocultural life of these diverse ecosystems riven by greed and steel.
(And here, let’s be clear: there has never been an “invasion” at the U.S.-Mexico border, and people have always – always – moved between regions. The border wall is unnecessary and ineffective in its stated goals. The true, primary function of the border wall continues to be a massive transfer of public wealth from the tax-paying, working people of the U.S. to the bank accounts of a network of ultra-wealthy Trump cronies and construction company owners who bribed him via “campaign contributions.” The definitive book has yet to be written on this, but in the meantime I highly recommend The Case for Open Borders by John Washington – more book recs below!)
Russ and I got to know each other as I joined him on trips in the field, and bonded during the successful civil disobedience that stopped former Arizona Governor Ducey’s stunt of building a border wall out of old shipping containers.
I was impressed as I read Russ’s poems. There’s a clarity and precision to them that creates a very human opening.
The pain of capitalist extraction juxtaposed with the beauty of parenting and the ecosystems that hold us.
I wanted the world to be able to witness not only the images of destruction, but also understand what was happening from the perspective of a human heart.
So after many conversations, Russ and I agreed that I should publish his debut book of poems.
I’ve had Artspeak Press for years. This was the imprint I used for my early chapbooks starting with Arroyo Ink in 2009, then shifting to support Spoken Futures Press in publishing youth poets throughout the 2010’s. More recently the Press was the logistics through which I published the run of NoVoGRAFíAS libros, but now I’m widening the focus to others’ work which I find urgent, necessary, and unlikely to easily find a route to publication otherwise.
Borderlings is the first. I hope there’s more to come.
One way to fight is to witness. Another is to put your body between the gnashing machines of destruction and all that is holy. Another is to amplify what you love, to bring work into the world that celebrates life and reminds us of what’s at stake.
from “Borderlings” by Russ McSpadden, Artspeak Press, 2025.
from “Borderlings” by Russ McSpadden, Artspeak Press, 2025.
'RECKON' Cover reveal!
~ Cover Reveal! ~
I finally get to reveal the cover of my next book, RECKON! Photo composition by yours truly, type design by Leigh McDonald.
Forthcoming from University of Arizona Press in February, RECKON is a hybrid memoir about being born in Tombstone, Arizona and being raised surrounded by the masculine myths of the West. The book contains poetry, essay, screenplay and more.
This has been the most difficult work I’ve ever written, because it’s by far the most honest. I started writing poetry as a teenager as a pressure release valve, a way of discovering who I was independent of all the cowboy masculinity of Cochise County. But it turns out you can’t run from where you come from forever. This is my return to the town where I was born to face it all.
I’m honored to be published by University of Arizona Press. The depth and breadth of their catalog on the region is unparalleled, and it feels like right where this book is supposed to be. I can’t wait for it to arrive into the world!
~ Save the date ~
RECKON Book Launch & Readings
Tucson - Sun. February 15, 191 Toole
Bisbee - Sat. February 21, Central School Project
Phoenix - Wed. February 25, venue TBA
Hoping to make it to Flagstaff, Albuquerque, Santa Fe, LA, Philadelphia & many more!
I’ll be on tour most of next year - please spread the word & get in touch to book readings, workshops & seminars!
“Logan Phillips’s Reckon is a hell of a book. More daring than pretty much everyone working with a wild interplay of text and image, found and made, Phillips transforms the town and tale of Tombstone, Arizona, into a celebration of mouth and mirth and myth. Phillips knows a masculinity that can’t see itself, appreciate its beauty and its terror, and laugh at its own excesses won’t have long to live. So lucky us: Reckon looks to have a real long life. Arizona needs this book. America needs this book. You do too.”
Radiant Ruin: Two More Chances to Engage
This Friday I’ll be offering an artist talk as part of my gallery show Radiant Ruin. Then on Saturday 9/20 we’re closing the show with an event we’re calling CUMBIAS ON CONVENT – a 3 hour DJ set from yours truly. I’ll be reprising the large-scale video projection one more time for that event.
If you’re interested in purchasing a piece from the show––available for shipping!––please get in touch.
A Book Playlist for Writers
As I finish up my time as Writer-In-Residence for the Pima County Public Library, I’m publishing this list of resources that I have shared with writers over the summer. The links go to the PCPL website, but you can likely find them at your own local library – I hope they’re as useful to you as they have been to me!
Interview with KOLD News.
Poster for the WIR Program, Summer 2025.
Write Your Story!
Here are some books that tell the author’s story in unexpected ways: fiction, poetry, essays and more.
Solito: A Memoir, Javier Zamora, 2022.
Story as memoir.The Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson, 1999.
Story as novel as poem!
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Ocean Vuong, 2019.
Story as novel.A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging, Dionne Brand, 2024.
Story as vignettes.Storyteller, Leslie Marmon Silko, 1981.
Story has poetic / photographic tapestry.Assata: An Autobiography, Assata Shakur, 2001.
Story as autobiography.Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal, Mohammed El-Kurd, 2025.
Story as essay collection.
PROCESS!
These are my top 5 recommendations for books to help your writing practice.
The Creative Act: A Way of Being, Rick Ruben, 2023. Penguin.
My number one recommendation!
Do You Feel Like Writing? A Creative Guide to Artistic Confidence, Frankie Rollins, 2023. Fifthbraincollective.com
Great for fiction, applicable to all forms.
Writing as a Path to Awakening: A Year to Becoming an Excellent Writer and Living an Awakened Life, Albert Flynn DeSilver, 2017. SoundsTrue.com
How to structure a creative life? Here writing and meditation are explored together.
Writing And Workshopping Poetry: A Constructive Introduction, Stephen Guppy, 2017. BroadviewPress.com. Available at UA Poetry Center.
I’ve used this as my textbook when I teach poetry courses
June Jordan’s Poetry For the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint, 1995. Available at UA Poetry Center.
A foundational, classic text for creating, teaching, sharing writing.
Other resources!
Some additional points of inspiration.
“The Taste Gap: Ira Glass on the Secret of Creative Success, Animated in Living Typography,” Maria Popova. Video / article.
Very relevant for folks just starting their creative journey“Rick Rubin: Magic, Everyday Mystery, and Getting Creative,” On Being with Krista Tippett. Podcast.
The Triggering Town, Richard Hugo. PDF.
I’ve found the first two chapters of this book to be very important since they were first recommended to me by Jericho Brown.